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Is Your Faith in God or in Your Faith?

I had a conversation with a friend the other day. We got to talking about the end of days and persecution. A common worry among believers is that we will not be able to stand in those days and will deny our Lord.

This morning I was reading Matthew 17:14-20.

When they came to the crowd, a man came to Yeshua, falling on his knees before Him and saying, “Master, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and suffers badly. For he often falls into the fire and often into the water. I brought him to Your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.”

And answering, Yeshua said, “O faithless and twisted generation! How long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.”Yeshua rebuked the demon and it came out of him, and the boy was healed from that very hour.

Then the disciples came to Yeshua in private and said, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”

And He said to them, “Because you trust so little. Amen, I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

The big question that we miss in today’s faith movement is ‘faith in what?’ Is it faith in our faith? Then we most assuredly will fall when pushed beyond human limitations.

Our faith should be in who God is – Creator of Everything. He speaks and time itself is born. He is beyond human comprehension, though He has revealed Himself to us in His Name, His Word, and the Word made flesh.

He loves us so much that He sent His Son to save us. This is what we trust (have faith in) as we walk through our day – whether stuck in traffic or in jail facing execution. Yes, it’s easier said than done, but it all starts with getting to know the One in whom we place our trust.

4 Responses to Is Your Faith in God or in Your Faith?

Trusting Abba is the crucial factor, and leaning on Yeshua’s righteousness.

It is not an easy thing to learn, to stop fretting over what is to come, but G-d’s work will be finished in us…we are not the ones who do it, so we do not need to worry about what is to come, for if we cannot change it, and have prepared for trouble in all the ways we can, we can only stand, whatever comes at us, and G-d will give us the strength.

In fact, except for keeping up with the news, and staying in prayer for others, and for G-d’s guidance and empowerment to do as he wishes us to do, what can we realistically do? Just live our lives as G-d would wish.

We are far into the setup for the Endtimes, but with no time schedule yet apparent. Things are announced daily that show that a schedule will show up sooner than we think.

They are already meddling with the DNA of unborn children, and putting nano computers in people to correct what they perceive as unwanted attributes or negative genes or to mark them for future control…we are in the times of the Noah and of Sodom. It will only get more blatant and violent.

We cannot fight what is happening, nor change it…it is that far advanced, I think. We do not know what we are to see and experience, but it will be a lot worse than what is.

But we have this comfort…nothing will happen to us that G-d will not enable us to undergo, and it will be for the benefit of the Kingdom, and for our benefit as well, even if what we go through is painful and frightening…even horrific.

It may not be safe, or comfortable, and is scary to think of, but it is what we will be given the ability to go through…so long as we lean on G-d, and trust that he knows more about what is going on that what we experience.

The hard part for parents is the thought of what our children (and grandchildren) will face. It’s easier for us to go through something than watch our children suffer.

Recently, something that my four-year-old grandson does has been breaking my heart. Not for him, but for the children of the holocaust. When he really doesn’t want to do something, he starts crying from the depth of his heart and saying, “No, no. Please, no.”

Seeing him in this state, I want to tear my heart out thinking about all those poor babies that faced horrific circumstances, horrific experiments, horrific deaths. How they must have cried for rescue! Oh God!

We are told that this life’s suffering is only for a ‘moment’…but that is a G-d moment, and excruciatingly long to us poor mortals.

All that we can do for the young ones is protect them now, give them all the love we can, but let them know that there will be hard and painful times in their lives that Abba will enable them to go through, that G-d will make them brave and strong…that it may hurt sometimes, and be scary, but then over, and never again to happen.

To me, telling of the adventures of David, or Daniel, of Joseph, and describing to them how courageously they faced physical difficulties and personal betrayal…making a ‘fairytale’ of a kind that is much more than the few lines of the Bible helps to give them an example to live up to in future times of trouble. They are little now, but they will grow, and the times are such that we will not be able to protect them.

But we also need to tell them that these things happen because evil exists, and so do evil people, and sometimes it seems like the evil people are winning…but in the end, Abba will make it all well again, and the evil people will be no more.

It is a hard thing to teach little ones, but necessary, I think. When violence has been a frequent thing in the past, it was not the actual pain that was so bad for the little ones, or the fear, but the lack of understanding that trouble and pain are just something that happens and has nothing to do with them…that they are not at fault, and that they can turn to Abba to get them through whatever may happen.

Loneliness, self-blame and fear are worse than physical suffering to us all, and the idea that we cannot protect the helpless a horrible thing.